'FARM TO LET.' 105 



laneous piles of articles which seemed to have 

 grown together by degrees in spite of original in- 

 congruity, and become reconciled at last, after the 

 manner of other foes, by lying under the same dust. 

 1 Indoor' and ' out-o'-door ' seemed to contend for 

 the mastery all over the room : if you looked into 

 the corners you might have fancied yourself in a 

 garden tool-house, if you looked on the mantel- 

 piece you thought of a chemist's shop : four dried 

 lumps of soil, as hard as stones, lay at one end of it 

 on separate pieces of ex-white paper, and through 

 their coating of dust feebly indicated the three 

 primary colours, blue red and yellow, with a sort of 

 grey for the fourth. Over several tiers of news- 

 papers between the windows, at the further end of 

 the room lay at full length two ' new and improved ' 

 Drainage-levels, out of Spirit though, for each 

 was carefully tied up with a direction card to the 

 maker: ' rejected addresses' evidently. Odd com- 

 binations, unmeaning and half meaning, disported 

 themselves over the confusion of the little den : the 

 end of a large pruning-knife peered out between the 

 sheets of a new half-cut volume marked ' Dendro- 

 logy,' suggesting something about Theory and Prac- 



